The Cultural Study of Music: a Critical Introduction
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the Cultural Study of Music OWIVERSIDAD MVERIA*A BlBLiOTFC* GENERAL CARRERA 7 filv. 41-00 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Cultural Study of Music a critical introduction edited by Martin Clayton Trevor Herbert Richard Middleton Routledge New York and London Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any informa tion storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 10 9 8 76 5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The cultural study of music : a critical introduction / edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, Richard Middleton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-93844-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-93845-7 (pbk. : alk paper) 1. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Music—Social aspects. I. Clayton, Martin. II. Herbert, Trevor. III. Middleton, Richard. ML3845 .C85 2002 306.4'84—dc21 2002152031 Contents Introduction Music Studies and the Idea of Culture RICHARD MIDDLETON PART I Music and Culture 1 Music and Biocultural Evolution 19 IAN CROSS 2 Musicology, Anthropology, History 31 GARY TOMLINSON 3 Music and Culture: Historiographies of Disjuncture 4 5 PHILIP V. BOHLMAN 4 Comparing Music, Comparing Musicology MARTIN CLAYTON 5 Music and Social Categories 6 9 JOHN SHEPHERD 6 Music and Mediation: Toward a New Sociology of Music 8 0 ANTOINE HENNION 7 Music and Everyday Life 9 2 SIMON FRITH 8 Music, Culture, and Creativity 102 JASON TOYNBEE Contents 9 Music and Psychology 113 ERIC F. CLARKE 10 Subjectivity Rampant! Music, Hermeneutics, and History 124 LAWRENCE KRAMER 11 Historical Musicology: Is It Still Possible? 136 ROB C. WEGMAN 12 Social History and Music History 146 TREVOR HERBERT PART II Issues and Debates 13 Musical Autonomy Revisited 159 DAVID CLARKE 14 Textual Analysis or Thick Description? IJI JEFF TODD TITON 15 Music, Experience, and the Anthropology of Emotion 181 RUTH FINNEGAN 16 Musical Materials, Perception, and Listening 193 NICOLA DIBBEN 17 Music as Performance 204 NICHOLAS COOK 18 Of Mice and Dogs: Music, Gender, and Sexuality at the Long Fin de Siecle 2/5 IAN BIDDLE 19 Contesting Difference: A Critique of Africanist Ethnomusicology 227 KOFI AGAWU 20 What a Difference a Name Makes: Two Instances of African-American Popular Music 238 DAVID BRACKETT 21 Locating the People: Music and the Popular 25/ RICHARD MIDDLETON Contents 22 Music Education, Cultural Capital, and Social Group Identity 263 LUCY GREEN 23 The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments 274 KEVIN DAWE 24 The Destiny of "Diaspora" in Ethnomusicology 284 MARK SLOBIN 25 Globalization and the Politics of World Music 297 MARTIN STOKES 26 Music and the Market: The Economics of Music in the Modern World 309 DAVE LAING References 321 Notes on Contributors Index 361 INTRODUCTION Music Studies and the Idea of Culture RICHARD MIDDLETON In recent years we have, one might suppose, seen the publication of more than enough navel-gazing collections exploring the current state of the disciplines of music studies. Why another? The idea for this book arose in a quite specific moment. Members of the newly formed Musics and Cultures Research Group at The Open University in Britain found that, although their work as individuals stemmed from a variety of disciplinary positions, they shared a sense that, to quote the book proposal: A tendency towards increasing concern with "culture" has been manifested in music scholarship for some time, and in a variety of ways. It would be too much to say that the various trajectories are converging, let alone that all will crystallize into a single field of "cultural musicology." Nonetheless, different approaches are interacting, and with increasing intensity, such that it is clear that a new paradigm may well be on the horizon. All the disciplines involved in the study of music will continue to be changed by this process, and some form of reconfiguration seems inevitable. It is more than five years since the original discussions, and the degree of programmatic clarity signaled, however hesitantly, in that statement already looks premature. The contents of this book could certainly not be taken to justify the announcement of any new paradigm (even though they do map many of the trajectories, approaches, and changes that we had in mind); but that was to be expected. More disappointing is the fact Richard Middleton that, in the discipline at large, the process of reconfiguration seems to have slowed markedly. This alone would justify engagement with the questions that initially exercised us, especially when so many other essays in intradis- ciplinary reassessment concentrate on one perspective alone (gender, the canon, history, musical analysis, or whatever the case may be). To look across the full range of disciplinary perspectives is important. Indeed, the parallelism of the different histories of engagement with "musics and cultures" research, together with their varied dialogues, seems to be integral to its problematic. The cultural turn in ethnomusicology associated above all with Alan Merriam's The Anthropology of Music (1964) and carried forward subsequently by Blacking, Feld, and many others; the maturing (from Howard Becker to Antoine Hennion and Tia DeNora) of a cultural sociology interested in music; the emergence of Anglophone cultural studies in the 1970s, its work on music partly over lapping with the equally new area of popular music studies (Frith, Hebdige, Grossberg, Tagg); the development of a "new" or "critical musi- cology," its birth conventionally dated from Joseph Kerman's Musicology (1985), and most influentially represented in the work of such authors as McClary, Tomlinson, and Kramer: the concurrence of these histories, roughly through the final three decades of the twentieth century, follow ing distinctive but often mutually affecting routes, marks a historical node in thinking about music that demands attention. This story, of course, is a story of the Western, particularly the Anglophone, academy. But then, notwithstanding the fruits of a multitude of ethnographic fieldwork proj ects, that academy has been conspicuously poor at learning from other intellectual traditions, or recognizing its impact in the outside world. It is hard to delineate with precision all that these various trajectories have in common, beyond a position against pure musical autonomy: "Music is more than notes" represents the bottom line, an idea whose seeming banality today perhaps signals its triumph. But this idea would hardly have come as a surprise to Baroque theorists of Affektenlehre, or medieval thinkers about music and theology, or even Plato (not to men tion classical Indian or Chinese music theorists). What was new in the late twentieth century, however, was precisely the concept of culture, in a spe cific sense associated with the post-Enlightenment world. We will return to the ramifications of this concept; for now, it is enough to note the political thrust of its usages in late modernity, which, within musical stud ies, has generated a whole range of characteristic impulses: attacks on "the canon," on "great composer history," and on "transcendental" aesthetics; Introduction critiques of "positivistic" historiographies and analytical methods; decon- structions of patriarchal, ethnocentric and other "ideological" interpreta tions; valorization of popular music cultures; the relativizing of differences between musical systems; and so on. On this level, the new approaches all stand for the proposition that culture matters, and that therefore any attempts to study music without situating it culturally are illegitimate (and probably self-interested). Still, even on this level, some might be tempted to ask what all the fuss is about. Surely this battle has been won. Does anyone still believe that musicology is the study of the scores of the great masters and nothing more? Aren't we all, to a greater or lesser extent, culturalists now? Well actually, the buzz of the new apparent at conferences, in journals and pub lishers' lists, and in certain university departments masks a rather slow rate of change, together with innumerable tactical adjustments in the academy at large designed to mask conservatism with the minimal accommodation possible. There is still plenty to fight for. Indeed, not only is the small pro portion of academic posts allocated to specialists in ethnomusicology or popular music indicative of this conservatism, it is all too clear that the pace of this accommodation is much slower than the speed with which these disciplines are transforming themselves. But in any case, to locate the battle on this terrain is to succumb to the parochialism of much of the old musicology itself. A tendency to treat the category of "culture" as transparent and universal, and therefore its accommodation as purely pragmatic, needs to be brought up against its historicity: as Francis Mulhern (2000, xiii) has pointed out, "culture" is a topic, and, as one of the most successful topics of late-modern discourse, has assumed the status of a commonplace—one of "those places in dis course in which an entire group meets and recognises itself" (Bourdieu 1993b, 168). It is this dimension of the commonsensical that explains how culture can so often still be taken for granted; to advance the debate, to win the battle, eventually perhaps to reconfigure the field, demands as a minimum the recognition that an introduction to the cultural study of music should be critical —and a useful starting point is the awareness that the concepts of both "culture" and "critique," in their recognizable mod ern meanings, emerged concurrently in the moment of the European Enlightenment.